


Happy Jackiversery

by Samking



Series: In the Woods Somewhere [1]
Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Ben and Jack show, Emily's abduction, Episode 25-AU, F/M, M/M, Sammy got Taken AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 05:03:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21030695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Samking/pseuds/Samking
Summary: An AU where Sammy was taken by the void and Jack comes to King Falls to look for him. One year later as Ben and Jack are celebrating their "Jackiversery" King Falls Head Librarian Emily Potter is abducted. Leaving Jack and Ben helpless to listen on their headsets, and reminding Jack of another abduction not too long before.





	Happy Jackiversery

“Ben, help me please. Ben!” Emily screamed through Jack’s headphones. He closed his eyes trying desperately not to get sucked into the memories of another morning just over a year ago. A much more quieter and privater abduction. The whispers of the Void, the quiet look of disappointment on Sammy’s face as Jack tried to explain to him why he had to go to King Falls, and then the black shadows that had descended upon his fiancé leaving no time for Sammy to even cry out an alarm.

Jack barely heard Emily’s final cry for Ben just before the dial tone began to filter in through Jack’s headphones, too busy hearing his own cries as he watched Sammy be swallowed by the very things that had been hunting him.

“Emily?” Ben desperately called through his own headset. “Hello? Emily? Oh my god please don’t- please-” The dial tone of Emily’s phone was ever present in the background of Ben’s pleas. “Don’t do this. Emily?” But Jack knew she was gone. The rainbow lights had gotten her like they had gotten Tim Jenson last year.

“Ben I-” Jack tried to find the words to say something- anything to make it seem like it would be alright. But he knew better than most that things weren’t going to be okay. That nothing was going to be okay while she- he was gone. “Folks, I think we’re going to play a commercial while we call the police.” There was a good chance Troy had heard what had happened already, but it was best to document this with the authorities as well.

“Jack she’s- they- the rainbow lights-” Whatever Ben was trying to say while the advertisement was playing, he couldn’t get it out.

“I know,” was all Jack could say. Ben didn’t know about Sammy, and right now was not the time to bring him up. Ben needed to deal with his own pain and trauma before Jack could unpack his own. It was okay though, he had leads, he was digging things up. He was going to find Sammy, and somehow, they were going to get Emily back too. Tim Jenson had been returned, albeit a little stranger than he had been prior to his abduction, but something traumatic like that could change your personality a little. Jack had read all about it in different UFO abduction stories.

Somehow in the haze of post Emily’s abduction he was able to pull his phone out and call Troy. Days later when he would think back to those moments, he still wasn’t sure how he had coherently talked to the police to report what had happened. He had never been sure how he had managed to report Sammy’s abduction. How did one describe shadows descending from the roof of your little bungalow that you share with your best friend slash radio partner and swallowing them whole?

Jack glanced around the radio station as he played back to back commercials. Ben was sitting in a stupor in his chair, headphones dangling off of one ear. Jack didn’t bother him, he just needed to find something to put on for the rest of the night, there was no way that they were going to be able to continue the show now. He could see the board all lit up with callers, but Jack knew as well as anybody could that there was no way they would be able to field calls, not after that.

He wished Sammy was here. He always wished Sammy was here, but especially in moments like these where things were going crazy and a cool head was needed. “Ben, I- I can’t find the best of that I prepared a few months back in case of emergencies,” Jack called from the office. “Did you move it?”

No response.

Jack sighed as combed through the desk drawer. He didn’t have much time, and his hand were shaking as he thumbed through stacks of tapes in the top drawer. It wasn’t there, it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there. Where could it have gone?

He could hear the commercial ending for Bass Tourney, he had to go back on the air.

“Just sit tight, Ben, I’m coming back,” Jack said scrambling to get back into his chair with his headphones on. “Uh, hello King Falls, I’m not sure how aware you are. But we believe that the Rainbow Lights have just abducted Emily Potter on Route Seventy-two. You need to avoid that area tonight as it has become an active crime scene.”

He glanced over at Ben who was staring off into space at the wall across from them. “If you folks will bear with me, I’m going to talk for a few more minutes before putting on another commercial and play a best of. I don’t think we’ll be taking any more calls tonight sorry folks.” Sammy would know what to say, he always did in a crisis. The world could be ending and somehow Sammy Stevens could keep a clear head.

Jack could see his terrified face as he was overtaken by shadowy hands and then dragged down into a nothingness.

“Please keep an eye out for the Rainbow Lights if you are out and about tonight and don’t try to get closer to investigate. They are dangerous and you should use extreme caution if you run into them.”

He needed something to talk about quickly, something he could ramble on about for a few minutes before it was time to play another commercial. Maybe something that would pull Ben out of his stupor as well.

“Ladies and Gentlemen let’s talk about loss,” he found himself saying. “We all go through it at some point or another, and we lose someone we care about. Whether that’s to nature’s course, or an argument, or some weird barely explainable mysterious force. Eventually we will lose something. Someone. And it hurts. God it hurts. Even if you were the one who created that loss. Especially if you were the one. But some loss can be good. Some people hold us back from being who we really are, some people are just plain assholes, and you shouldn’t mourn losing them.

“But then there are the true losses. The ones that you regret losing. The ones that make your insides feel like stone because how are you breathing without them right there, right beside you. And you wonder how did you lose this one too?

“But ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that it will get better. That ache of the loss never goes away, how could it. But you learn to live with it, to move around it, even when it feels like there’s some huge part of you missing...”

And Jack talked about his own feelings of loss, glancing over at Ben every few seconds as he did so. Ben is looking at him now instead of the wall. A puzzled look on his face as if he’s trying to figure something out. Jack looked away from him, hoping his face isn’t betraying everything to Ben. Sammy always said he wore his emotions on his sleeves. Lily would say that she never could understand how everyone didn’t just know he was gay because he wasn’t a stoic Neanderthal like most men.

“Who did you lose?” Ben asked as Jack’s ramble came to a lulling moment. “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.”

“My Dad died about three years ago now,” Jack answered. It’s not even fully a lie, more of a deflection. He can’t talk about Sammy, not today, not yet. He and his dad had been close when Jack was growing up, but they had drifted apart once Jack moved to Florida and got his gig as a radio producer with Lily and Sammy. He called at least once a week to talk to his parents, even after everything with Lily blew up, but still it didn’t feel the same as it had when he was a kid. He had been shocked to get the phone call from his mom saying that his father had been in a car accident, and his loss was still cutting. But there were others now that were more pressing. There was nothing he could do for his father, not anymore. But he still had a chance with Sammy.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ben said. He spoke quietly, without all of his normal enthusiasm.

“And I think we’re going to cut to commercial now. I’m going to put on a best of after this. Thanks for listening to Ben and Jack on 660 Am.”

He pressed the button for another commercial to play, this one for Glory Holes, and ran into the office to find the missing tape. “Check the bottom drawer,” Ben said, standing in the doorway of the office. Jack bent down to open up the bottom drawer of their rickety desk to find a whole stack of best ofs. “I like to be prepared.”

“Thanks.” Jack picked one up and walked back over to the board to line it up after the commercial finished. “Come on, I’ll drive you home.”

The drive to Ben’s house is quiet, Jack doesn’t even dare turn on the radio and he keeps his eyes out for any signs of the UFOs. They had hovered over town for weeks without taking anyone, and now… Jack glanced over at Ben who looks tinier than usual as he curls up in the passenger seat of Sammy’s Prius. “Get some sleep,” He orders his partner when they reach the house that Ben rents. “Things will be better.” He doesn’t say when they’ll get better, he can’t promise that. Only that they will. That the pain will fade into a throb, an ever present one that flares up at random moments. That there are some mornings he will wake up and isn’t sure how he continues to live his life. That seeing Ben and hearing from the good folks of King Falls is the only way he gets out of bed some mornings.

“Thanks, Jack.”

“Anytime.” It’s a promise. One that Jack intends to always keep. He watches as Ben stumbles into his house, and then waits a few moments to watch as the lights are turned on in the house. Then he puts the Prius in reverse and heads towards his own apartment on the other side of town.

Jack can’t rightly say when his spiral into obsession over King Falls began. He had always loved the paranormal, used to bring it up at times on the radio show he, Lily, and Sammy did back in Tampa. Lily and Sammy always played those topics off as jokes as much as he had wanted them to take it seriously. They didn’t believe in the paranormal, thought Jack was weird to believe in it so much. Jack could take their good-natured ribbing; he knew they were never malicious in their disbelief.

Then he and Sammy left to do Shotgun Saturday Nights in Denver. He hated doing Shotgun, he hated the people who worked at the XM station. Most of them didn’t have the excuse that their machismo bullshit was a façade so that people wouldn’t know they were gay. A terrible excuse too, and Jack knew it. But it was the lie he and Sammy would tell themselves so they could feel somewhat decent about their job. It made good money, paid the bills, allowed them to get a little house on the outskirts of Denver. Jack fell into his research of King Falls then; he had known about the little mountain town in Idaho prior. But suddenly he got really interested in it. And then he got obsessed with it. And then suddenly he was getting phone calls from unknown numbers with strange noises on the other end. He cataloged all of them. There was something about those woods, Perdition Woods, and Jack was going to find out what made them so evil. How there could possibly be a doorway to Hell in those woods. And then he found the book, _Death by Damnation_, and that had changed everything.

He tried to convince Sammy they should take a weekend to go check out the town, but Sammy at that point had grown very concerned with Jack’s obsession. He had declined, Jack wondered now if he was afraid to give in to his delusions. Because Sammy wouldn’t go with him, Jack had decided to go by himself, he promised to come back. It was only going to be four-day trip. Sammy had come out of their little bungalow to beg him to come back inside, to put off his trip. Jack hadn’t understood why then, not until later when he was going through Sammy’s desk and found the research on mental illnesses. Sammy had been afraid that if he let Jack go, he might never come back. Then the shadows came and took Sammy though Jack knew they had wanted him, they had wanted him, and they wanted the book that had been sitting in the passenger seat beside him.

Jack gets home and curls up in his bed waiting for the slightly taller man to join him so they can spoon and cuddle. But he never comes. He can’t come. He’s trapped in the Void, in Perdition Woods, in the Devil Doorstep, and Jack doesn’t know how to get him out. And now there’s someone else trapped, she’s not in the Void with Sammy, instead she’s trapped with the Rainbow Lights, in the unknown of the UFO. And Jack doesn’t know how to rescue her any more than he knows how to rescue Sammy.

**Author's Note:**

> Well this is the first in a series of probably one-shots that I'm writing where Jack comes to King Falls to look for Sammy Stevens. Thanks for reading.


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